About PLA Daily

PLA Daily

PLA Daily, in full the People's Liberation Army Daily and in Chinese Jiefangjun Bao, is the official newspaper of China's People's Liberation Army and of the Central Military Commission. Based in Beijing, with its headquarters listed on Fuchengmenwai Street in Xicheng District, it has been published since 1 January 1956. Institutionally, the paper provides information on the policies and viewpoints of the Central Military Commission and, in that capacity, speaks on behalf of the PLA itself. Its website is listed as eng.chinamil.com.cn, the English-language China Military Online service. For outside readers, it is the closest thing China has to a daily public voice of its armed forces.

Founding in 1956

The PLA Daily was established on 1 January 1956 under the aegis of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Military Commission as the army's official newspaper. Its creation gave the young People's Republic of China a single, central daily for its military, seven years after the founding of the state in 1949 and at a time when the PLA was being organised as a standing, professional armed force rather than a revolutionary guerrilla army. The complete run of the paper from that first issue is preserved in digital archives: the University of Nottingham's library service, describing a trial of the People's Liberation Army Daily database, notes that the archive is complete from the first issue in 1956 to 31 December 2016 and reproduces the content in Chinese exactly as it appeared in the published original. East View, which markets the Jiefangjun Bao digital archive to libraries, likewise describes it as first published on 1 January 1956 and as a principal authoritative voice of the PLA across more than seven decades.

Ownership and organisation

The PLA Daily is owned and operated by the Political Work Department of the Central Military Commission. Until 2016 that role belonged to the PLA's General Political Department; the change of name reflects the sweeping military reorganisation announced at the start of 2016, in which, as Xinhua reported, the four military headquarters — staff, politics, logistics and armaments — were reorganised into 15 agencies, the seven military area commands were regrouped into five theatre commands, and new services including the Rocket Force were established. The paper's staff and correspondents mostly come from the press bureaus of the army's service branches and theatre commands nationwide, according to reference accounts, which gives the newspaper a reporting network embedded inside the force it covers. Its political alignment is listed as the Chinese Communist Party, and its editorial line is described as hewing closely to that of the Party's own official newspaper, the People's Daily.

The Cultural Revolution and Two Newspapers and One Journal

The paper's most politically charged period came during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976. Reference histories record that during the Cultural Revolution the publication's chief editor was purged in a political struggle, and Marshal Lin Biao — at the time Mao Zedong's close comrade and Minister of National Defense — was named officer in charge of the paper in an acting capacity before becoming its editor in chief. From 1967 to 1978, the most important editorials of the newspaper were jointly published by the People's Daily and the journal Red Flag together with the PLA Daily's own staff, a combination known as the Two Newspapers and One Journal, directly representing the highest voice of the Chinese Communist Party. The China Media Project has documented that formula as a mechanism by which a small set of central publications spoke with unified authority during those years.

Scholars also note that the PLA Daily was one of the few major periodicals that continued publication during the Cultural Revolution. A study in the Journal of Cultural Analytics, analysing the paper's language from 1956 to 1989, observes that its pages ranged from personal memoirs and cooking recipes to revolutionary agitation and war coverage, offering insight into the social and political realities of post-1949 China, and that it has received relatively little scholarly attention outside political science studies of the propaganda system. That breadth is part of the paper's documentary value today: its editorials, official statements and military commentary record changes in Chinese strategic thinking, military organisation, political doctrine and force modernisation, as East View's archive description puts it.

What the paper covers

The PLA Daily reports on military affairs while also communicating official positions on defence policy, political education, military doctrine, national security, technological modernisation and the role of the armed forces within the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese state, according to East View's description of the archive. In practice, as library guides at the University of Southern California summarise it, the paper chronicles the evolving narrative of China's military affairs and extends into broader policy realms, mirroring public discourse in alignment with the Party's ideological framework. Its day-to-day material includes editorials, news stories and military communications from across the services and theatre commands, written largely by correspondents drawn from those same structures.

The paper is therefore read less as an independent check on the military than as the military's own authorised account of itself. That is precisely why foreign analysts study it. A paper that speaks for the Central Military Commission tells researchers what the PLA leadership wants its own personnel, and the wider Chinese public, to hear — about training, weapons development, international security policy and relations between the Communist Party and the armed forces.

Editorial line and scholarly use

Reference accounts stress that, while officially serving as the voice of the military, the PLA Daily does not stray far from the Party's own messaging on foreign policy. Scholar Alastair Iain Johnston, writing in International Security in 2013, observed that there is a strong correlation between foreign policy rhetoric in the Party's civilian voice, the People's Daily, and its military voice, the PLA Daily. Similarly, scholars with the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College have treated the appearances of leaders' pet policy initiatives in the paper as evidence of those leaders' strength in the military, citing the vast number of appearances of propaganda related to the scientific development concept promulgated by Party leader Hu Jintao as evidence that Hu's influence on certain areas of the PLA's development since 2004 had been substantial.

The paper can, however, carry strikingly self-critical material. In August 2010, Reuters reported, an editorial in the PLA Daily suggested that Chinese military strategy was out of date and that China must audaciously learn from the experience of the information cultures of foreign militaries, alongside modernisation and open procurement. The editorial was widely noticed abroad precisely because it appeared in the military's own newspaper rather than in a commercial outlet.

Recognition and standing

Within China's official newspaper system, the PLA Daily's standing has been formally recognised. In March 2018 the paper won a place in the Third National Top 100 Newspapers in China, in results reported by the People's Daily and Xinhua. That listing placed the military daily among the country's officially ranked leading newspapers, alongside the central Party and state titles with which it has been institutionally paired since the 1960s.

Digital presence and archives

The paper's public digital face is China Military Online, listed in reference works under eng.chinamil.com.cn for English readers, within the wider Chinese military web presence built around chinamil.com.cn and the 81.cn domain family — 81 referring to 1 August, Army Day, the anniversary of the PLA's founding in the Nanchang uprising of 1 August 1927. Jamestown Foundation research notes that in August 2009 the Ministry of National Defense created official websites in Chinese and English, the English service being known as China Military Online or chinamil.com, and that the services and commands developed their own sites using 81.cn as the base. For researchers, the fuller digital resource is the licensed Jiefangjun Bao archive marketed by East View, which provides the complete Chinese text from 1956 onward and, with an optional English Reader add-on, searchable English translations produced with artificial intelligence tools. University libraries including those at Nottingham and the University of Southern California list the archive as a primary source for studying China's military and political dynamics.

Why the paper matters

The PLA Daily matters because of the institution behind it. The PLA itself began, as Xinhua's Army Day reporting recalls, with about 20,000 soldiers in the Nanchang uprising of 1 August 1927 and has grown to around two million service personnel across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Rocket Force and other services. A force of that size and political weight, led by the Central Military Commission, communicates its priorities through very few authorised public channels, and its daily newspaper is the oldest and most continuous of them. Its historical coverage encompasses, as East View summarises, the Mao era, the Cultural Revolution, post-Mao military reform, China's economic opening, the modernisation and professionalisation of the PLA, and China's emergence as a major military and geopolitical power. Readers who approach it with that context — as an official voice to be analysed, not an independent report to be taken at face value — will find it one of the most revealing regularly published documents in Chinese public life, and the essential starting point for anyone tracing how China's military presents itself to its own ranks and to the world.